User Profile Results Empty in SharePoint 2010: Configure Crawl and Search for User Profiles

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Technorati Tags: User Profile Service,Search Results Empty,SharePoint 2010,Enterprise Search,Central Administration,Configure Crawlers,User Profiles

After configuring SharePoint 2010’s User Profile Services with successful synchronization of user profiles, setting up your My Site host you assume that all should be well to be able to perform People search and bring people’s profiles. Well, not all the time. In order to for SharePoint to successfully crawl the user profiles from the User Profile Service you need to give the search account the “Retrieve People Data for Search Crawler” permission.

For the permission following the following steps:

  • In Central Administration choose Application Management the Manage Service Applications
  • Select the User Profile Service by tapping towards the right of the text
  • Choose the Administrators button from the toolbar
  • If you search account is not included go ahead and add it to the list
  • Check the Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers permission
  • Click Ok

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That should generally do it. You would then need to force a full crawl in order to confirm that the crawler now indexes all user profiles. Of course I’m assuming that you have already setup a Search Center in order to be able to test the People search functionality.

In some cases this might not work if the default My Site is not part of the Local SharePoint Sites search source. In that case you need to add the “sps3://my” or “sps3://mysite” or whatever your My Site Host is named.